The winners of the Orwell Prize have just been announced. This is an extremely reputable award which celebrates political writing as an art form. As Orwell once wrote, “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.” This sentiment runs through the heart of the Orwell Foundation, awarding the prizes to the candidates which most successfully combine the political with the artistic.
The winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing is Kate Clanchy with her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. This book offers reflections on her thirty year career as a teacher and how her students’ stories offer insights into British society. Today, teaching as a profession is wrongfully undermined and drastically under-resourced, thus Clanchy is able to highlight just how important school is in shaping the lives of its students. She has responded by tweeting, “this means so much to me as a writer and a teacher.”
The winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction is Colson Whitehead with his novel The Nickel Boys. This was chosen for its unflinching depiction of corruption and racial brutality. It is inspired by the true story of the Dozier School for Boys in the small panhandle town of Marianna, Florida. He wrote the novel after learning through Tampa Bay Times that students from the University of South Florida had dug up and attempted to identify the remains of students who had been tortured, raped, mutilated, and then buried in a secret graveyard, under the control of the state-run school. Whilst it is undoubtedly an extremely uncomfortable and heartbreaking read, it is an expertly crafted novel, shining a light on America’s veiled racial terrorism.
The winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism is Janice Turner, for her columns on human trafficking and the ‘red wall’, and a feature on clearing her childhood home in Doncaster. This was announced on Times Radio this afternoon, as the Chair of Judges, Ben Fenton, claimed “the essence of Brexit oozed from every sentence.” Janice Turner is a columnist and feature writer for The Times, having produced a remarkable series of articles on Brexit Britain, written through fearless and intelligent prose.
The winner of the Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils is Ian Birrell, a foreign reporter and columnist for Africa Express. It was awarded for his searing investigation into the abuse of vulnerable people within the healthcare system. This article was able to expose the inhuman social evils taking place at the very heart of Britain’s health care system. The campaign he drove across several outlets has ultimately lead to five official inquiries and a widespread debate. The judge Farrah Storr stated, “Birrell is both brilliant and tireless in his effort to expose one of the darkest corners of Britain’s institutions. He uses every journalistic trick in the book from good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting to elegant, sensitive prose to make you care deeply about one of the UK’s biggest injustices.”
The Orwell Prize is the UK’s most prestigious prize for political writing. It strives to fulfil Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into art”. The winners of the award should combine both beautifully crafted and artful writing, with factual, compelling political content, mirroring the very essence of Orwell’s work. Founded in 1993 by Sir Bernard Crick, Orwell’s first biographer, Crick established the prize to encourage writers to develop more politically engaging content, accessible to the reading public, not merely esoteric academic audiences. He funded the award using the royalties he gained from writing George Orwell: A Life (1980). You can find out more about the Orwell Prize here.
This year’s winners are wholly deserving candidates, all having produced powerful, audacious pieces of writing, congruent to Orwell’s belief that “intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face… If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. Their writing indeed emulates the very nature of this prestigious award, to make political writing an art, celebrating the right to speak honestly, freely and boldly.
Words by Sylvia O’Hara
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